I'm Not a Time Lord

(Another) new baby in the house, and I have full responsibility for the toddler at the moment and less time than ever, so just a quick article share and some recent pictures that I enjoy.

Study: Kids can learn as much from ‘Sesame Street’ as from preschool

The most authoritative study ever done on the impact of “Sesame Street,” to be released Monday, finds that the famous show on public TV has delivered lasting educational benefits to millions of American children — benefits as powerful as the ones children get from going to preschool. . . .

The potentially controversial implication they embrace from the study isn’t about early-childhood education. It’s about college, and the trend toward low-cost massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

“Sesame Street,” Levine and Kearney write, was the original MOOC. “If we can do this with ‘Sesame Street’ on television, we can potentially do this with all sorts of electronic communications,” . . .

From the start, the program rooted its scripts in an academic curriculum designed to help children — particularly low-income urban kids — prepare for school. . . .

“Sesame Street” researchers aggressively test their shows via focus groups to see what works. Their success, they said, rests on a simple formula that wraps education in entertainment, harnessing the power of human narrative. They said the approach could easily extend to college students — to MOOCs — as well as preschoolers.

“Storytelling is critical,” Clarke said. “If you organize information in storytelling, children are more likely to learn it. And adults are, too.” . . . 

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